IT IS impossible to watch footage of the VE Day celebrations in 1945 and not be swept up by the sheer joy of it all - people clambering up lampposts, doing the Lambeth Walk and jumping in the fountains in Trafalgar Square.

How easy it is to imagine that at some point over the next few months we will enjoy our own VC Day - Victory over Coronavirus - when we will once again rush out to celebrate our release from lockdown. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that our own privations even slightly compare with what people went through 75 years ago. The past few weeks have produced their anxieties and their tragedies, but nothing like on the scale of six years of all-out war.

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VE Day provides a chance to put our own problems into perspective. Look a little harder at the faces in those old newsreels and you can see that not everyone is jubilant. In many people's eyes you can see not wild celebration but pure relief.

And for every person dipping in the fountains or wandering down the Strand, arm-in-arm, there were many more people at home, still suffering in their private grief - or worry.The war wasn't really over at all on May 8, 1945 - Germany had been defeated but Japan would fight on for another three months.

For a lot of people on VE Day, their emotions were torn between joy of the moment and the knowledge that they still had friends and relatives in the Far East, either fighting or marooned under horrible conditions in concentration camps - their fate unknown. By VJ Day in August many more would be killed.

VE Day was, as Churchill put it in his radio broadcast that day, a "brief period of rejoicing" while the battle still raged elsewhere.

But it was the moment Britain finally emerged from a long existential crisis. Nearly 400,000 servicemen and nearly 70,000 civilians had been killed but it wasn't just individuals' lives that were at stake. It was our whole way of life.

For most of the war Britain had had to live with the constant threat of invasion by one of the most depraved regimes in history. The freedoms we now take for granted would have been wiped out in an instant as we were thrown into a reign of terror It doesn't bear thinking what those years must have been like for Jewish refugees who had escaped the clutches of the Nazis once - and who still faced systematic execution had Britain fallen.

Many of us over the past few weeks have had a moan at overzealous police officers chastising people for buying Easter eggs or driving to a national park. But no, they are not Nazis, as they are sometimes called. No one who had encountered genuine Nazi officers would use the term so flippantly.

Today, we face a serious threat of infection and, in a disturbing number of cases, death. Yet it hardly compares with the nightly threat of a violent death. Up until a few weeks before the VE Day films were shot, V2 rockets were still raining down on London, bringing instant and random death.

Yes, the pubs, shops and cinemas were open on VE Day - unlike now. People were not under instructions to remain at home. But in every other way, everyday life had been constrained for years. There were blackouts and shortages of nearly everything.

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A group of Land Girls dance among crowds heading towards Trafalgar Square as they celebrate VE Day (Image: Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

There was severe rationing and would be for a decade to come. After those joyous VE Day celebrations, people would have returned to near-empty kitchens and larders - if, that is, their homes were still standing.

It is easy to moan about lockdown, yet the supermarkets are now full with luxuries that would have been unimaginable 75 years ago. Large numbers of people have, sadly, lost their jobs. Their careers might not recover for many years.

But at least now we have a well-developed welfare state to fall back upon - and in many cases a generous furlough scheme. In 1945 the welfare state was in its infancy. The NHS, which we have been vigorously applauding over the past few weeks, did not yet exist.

It is a shame we cannot enjoy VE Day as we would have liked to have done, with street parties, carnivals and concerts. Perhaps lockdown will be eased in time for more fulsome celebrations on the 75th anniversary of VJ Day on August 15. But in the meantime we can remember just what a tremendous feat Britain performed in resisting and then defeating Nazi aggression in the Second World War - and reflect on how the huge sacrifices that people made then have helped improve our lives ever since.